Doomed: The Untold Story of Roger Corman's The Fantastic FourReview

The glut of comic-book movies that fill the cinema these days has also led to a perhaps not surprising look back among fans, filmmakers and commentators at the simpler times of the genre, with documentaries and oral histories emerging about everything from the ill-fated Nicolas Cage Superman to the nearly forgotten 1970s Doctor Strange TV movie and beyond. The latest of these trips to what-might-have-been land, and in some cases what-never-should’ve-been land, is Doomed: The Untold Story of Roger Corman's the Fantastic Four, which is out on DVD and Blu-ray this week.

An 84-minute retrospective about the never (officially) released film from the early 1990s, Doomed is a pretty interesting (if blandly assembled) journey for those already invested in superhero history, and in particular the sometimes labyrinthine Hollywood deals that Stan Lee and Marvel Comics got its properties involved with back before the current heyday that has placed its heroes at the top tier of the multiplex blockbusters.

The documentary features current interviews with many of the key players from the film, including director Oley Sassone, stars Alex Hyde-White (Reed Richards), Rebecca Staab (Sue Storm), Joseph Culp (Dr. Doom), Carl Ciarfalio (the Thing), Michael Bailey Smith (Ben Grimm -- yeah, the production used two different guys to play the ever-lovin’ one), Jay Underwood (Johnny Storm), Kat Green (Alicia Masters), and many more. Even Corman himself, legendary king of the B-movies, is present, although when the real drama of this Fantastic Four’s story kicks in, Corman’s talking head is unfortunately nowhere to be found. He’s too smart to get pinned down on such details.

That drama is alluded to throughout the doc even as we hear about what a low-budget but, by all accounts, from the heart production the film was. Though The Fantastic Four, as the film was called (complete with “The”), was thought by many involved to be a potential big break for their careers, when it came time to actually release the thing, the company which held the rights to adapt the FF from Marvel, German producer Bernd Eichinger’s Constantin Film, opted to shelve it instead. While bootlegs of Sassone’s movie can be found at any comics convention these days (and surely online as well), it has never officially been released.

That’s because -- depending on who you ask -- the film was never meant to be released and was just a stopgap for Constantin Film to retain the rights to the FF characters. Or was it that after the film was shot, Marvel’s then bigwig Avi Arad caught wind of it and decided that he didn’t want to sully the Fantastic Four brand with a low-budget outing starring no-name actors in what looked like homemade cosplay costumes? One of the disappointing aspects of Doomed is that it never quite gets to the bottom of what really happened here, but one supposes that this far down the line the truth of the matter is lost to geek history anyway.

The Fantastic Four who never were

Interestingly, the talent involved -- including director Sassone (who still seems to be stinging from what happened to his movie, albeit in a philosophical way) -- wind up pondering whether or not the death of this FF wasn’t a key part of the evolution of the Marvel Studios of today. Sassone says he can see Arad’s side of it to a degree -- and Stan Lee’s as well, who isn’t portrayed in a particularly favorable light here. Just as real Hollywood studio interest started to focus on Marvel, with Arad selling the rights to the X-Men to Fox for example, perhaps it wasn’t the best time for this Fantastic Four to flame on. Maybe it just needed… to flame out.

The Verdict

Doomed: The Untold Story of Roger Corman's The Fantastic Four ultimately winds up being a story about creators and artists who did their best with the limited means they had to make their art, only to then have all that effort and passion pulled out from under them for corporate reasons. And yet, the doc is not a sob story, as those involved are still able to look back fondly on the experience while also taking comfort in the possibility that The Fantastic Four’s non-release actually could’ve led to it being better known than anyone ever expected. We are still talking about it, after all.